The present invention relates to an apparatus for monitoring the operating state of an artificial internal organ having movable portions such as an artificial heart.
Because of the absence of a practical long term artificial heart and difficulties in reducing the size of the entire system including a driving apparatus, etc., an artificial heart is not usually of, the type which is buried in the human body (i.e., perfect artificial heart) but rather is of the type that is attached onto the human body (i.e., auxiliary heart). An auxiliary heart is temporarily used for the purpose of compensating for the weakened physical strength of a patient during and after a surgical operation.
When using an artificial heart of this type, it is necessary to monitor the operating state thereof at all times. Stated differently, if any abnormally should be caused in a driving apparatus, artificial heart or the patient himself, it is impossible to anticipate what sort of failure will occur in the artificial heart correspondingly, and it can not be determined what action is to be taken in such an emergency case, until the doctor has checked the inside of the artificial heart.
Many artificial hearts are transparent and, if they remain as they are, the operating state of such artificial hearts can be directly observed from the outside. However, excepting the case of an animal experiment, when an auxiliary heart is actually attached to the human body, the artificial heart must be covered with cloth or bandages to thereby prevent, for example, bacterial infection through the parts where tubes of the artificial heart are led out of the body. For this reason it is impossible to observe the actual operating state of the artificial heart after it has been attached to the human body.